In my previous post on Emerson, I noted that I am reading Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy and while he self-admittedly has a political position to make with his book, his opening section shows a much more complete portrait of Emerson’s thought than either the Self-Reliance or American Scholar essay shows. He’s both more thoughtful and more appalling than those essays reveal… As these are the two most common pieces of Emerson’s taught in American lit courses in high school, I am moved to wonder a couple of things:
- How much our treatment of Emerson minimizes or even parodies his insights and dismisses his influence on American philosophy and literature
- If the complexities of a figure like Emerson help explain why humanities teachers tend to like teaching literature and film–specifically, fiction: it deliberately (over-)simplifies some aspect of life/human-nature for its presentation. There is no pretense of “putting things into perspective” or except *very* occasionally doing much with the actual complexities of life.
Addendum: I do not exempt myself from the criticism/observation of the last point. I have maintained many times that I would love to spend a whole semester working on Hamlet. But when my students complain that there’s “no more left to learn” after about three weeks of intense work, I often give up even though I think we have barely scratched the surface of the amazingly cool complexities of the play.